Review in a Nutshell:Johnny Mnemonic is a poor adaptation with a surprisingly high number of hilarious things going on it. It’s proof positive that some authors should not be allowed to adapt their own work.

I have not listened to this yet, but because of The Giant Bombcast, whenever we see Ice-T, me and my boyfriend say ‘Put you in an orange jumpthuit, thend you to Rikerth’. When I was scrolling through the descriptions on the blog and saw the caption under his pic, I started choking on my own lols.

It’s weird to know that my imitation of Dave imitating Ice T is actually my imitation of Dave imitating the Giant Bombcast guys imitating Ice T. It’s like a game of telephone in which the Ice T impersonation grows into something more mythical with each additional iteration.

This movie is awesome! I think the best part about it is the fact that not a single aspect of the movie is anywhere close to being good but somehow as a whole it is incredibly fun to watch and completely epicly awesome!

I refuse to acknowledge “biopunk” as a genre. My reading of the wikipedia article, wherein an author tries to coin the term ‘ribofunk’ because biopunk sounds too outdated, only confirms my decision as the correct one. The distinction between ‘bio’ and ‘cyber’ seems pretty useless to me.

My only objection to classifications like “biopunk” and “steampunk” is that they don’t really tell us much about the tone of the story, just what kind of fantastical elements we can expect to encounter therein. In cyberpunk, the PUNK was as important as the CYBER, it wasn’t just a phoneme appended to the end of another phoneme to make a new word.

There’s also an obvious parallel in the philosophy and body modification of ‘cyber’ and the philosophy and modification of ‘punk’ where a like, an RNA virus in “biopunk” doesn’t really carry the same shock value.

I think I am well within my rights to dismiss a genre that, by everything I’ve found on the internet, seems to be made up by people who wanted to be different, not because it happened for natural reasons.

You know I think in all this time I haven’t really considered the ‘punk’ half of cyberpunk… When I think of the genre the first thing that pops into my mind is Ghost in the Shell, and then maybe The Matrix. I think those movies lacked the punk that I would encounter later with Neuromancer

That’s the point that Dave and I are arguing. Most of the “steampunk” stuff I’ve encountered has not portrayed any of the dissaffection and nihilism of punk; a lot of it is pretty upbeat, “hey what a magical world this would be” stuff. Just slapping -punk at the end of something to describe a new genre is eroding the meaning of the word.

As for the Neuromancer film, for a property that has already spent 20+ years in development hell, I think I will retain the position of skepticism until such a time as it is actually playing at my local metroplex.

To be honest, I think one of Udo Kier’s bodyguards is transgendered. Tracy Tweed, the sister of Shannon Tweed, played the blonde.

Also, it’s interesting that Dave picked up on the fat hitman’s gun. I don’t actually think that it was an actual gun. Instead, I think it was an air gun. In fact, this movie has a remarkably lack of guns for a cyberpunk movie. If I recall, even Johnny in the short story is packing two shotguns with the triggers wired together in a duffel bag.

What you should do as a follow-up is Abel Ferrera’s adaptation of Gibson’s “New Rose Hotel”. If you thought JM was bad, you haven’t seen that. Wilhelm DeFoe and Christopher Walken can’t save that film, and, for some reason, that movie has Yoshitaka Amano, character designer for the first few Final Fantasy games and Vampire Hunter D, in it.

Also, I had owned the video game. I think the only thing remarkable of it was that Julie Strain played the bodyguard and the Craig T. Nelson’s daughter from Coach played Jane.

I’ve seen New Rose Hotel, part of my old roommate’s initiative to introduce me to the worst movies ever (all of which he owned). I mostly just remember it being terrible and incomprehensible. His selling point was, as with most of these movies, “It has Christopher Walken!” and maybe Asia Argento?

I agree that the “-punk” in such terms as “steampunk,” “dieselpunk,” and “rocketpunk,” seems to have no particular connection to the “-punk” in “cyberpunk” (it’s worth recalling that the hero of Neuromancer is established as a thief, a murderer and a drug dealer before he even gets drawn into the novel’s main plot). I would assume the reason such terms as “steampunk” arose is similar to the reason the generation after “Generation X” is called “Generation Y;” from a lack of effort to articulate some more distinctive name, and a desire to ride off the trade value of “cyberpunk,” the last movement in literary SF to enter the public consciousness.

I think it’s sort of funny that the two plot premises you found the least believable are the two I don’t have much problem with. First, the idea that big pharma would let people die in the name of profit, which is basically what happens every day. Sure, they can’t give away medicine because they have to recoup the sunk costs of researching cures, but they also have to pay shareholders– they aren’t nonprofits or charities. An argument is that the profit-driven model gets results better than a publicly funded model, but a real consequence is that lots of people die because of medicine they can’t afford, either in the third world, or in the first world, due to pricing disparities.

Second, the “Black Shakes” being caused by excessive exposure to EMF is indeed sort of silly and a product of the naive fears of its time, perhaps (my parents for a long time, weren’t sure about microwave ovens). But the premise itself is fine: humans have a very poor track record for being able to predict how ubiquitous a technology will become, or the side effects of having a society saturated with it. If I had to rewrite it today, it’d be about the various articles on how people’s attention spans have been shattered by content availability, how the average person spends 7 seconds on a webpage, about how I got a text on my phone before switching off the audiobook on my iPod in my car to change it to your podcast, while wondering what tweets I’d missed over the weekend. Reddit causes it! And 4chan causes it! And RSS causes it! Information overload, man! Maybe in 10 years it will also seem silly to future viewers, but maybe they’ll be able to manage the constant stream of GMail notifications and livestream content in their ocular implant’s HUD.

My only point is that in the real world, companies aren’t actively trying to murder the general public by deliberately withholding life-saving treatments. That’s cartoon supervillain levels of evil. Yes, there are evils committed in the pursuit of profit, that’s undeniable. But we’re not talking about a company holding onto a patent when a generic version of a drug could save lives; we’re talking about a company that knowingly and voluntarily is capable of treating a disease (and profiting from the treatment) but is refusing to do so and taking elaborate, expensive steps to cover it up in favor making more money. Nevermind what it would inevitably cost the company when their monolithic conspiracy is uncovered. Nevermind that independent research would eventually find the cure anyway.

Even in the short term, the risk / reward of the scenario doesn’t add up. It’s the same problem I had with Moon. There’s evil-for-profit, and then there’s just senselessly evil, and I think in both cases we have the latter. It takes me out of the film.

but is refusing to do so and taking elaborate, expensive steps to cover it up in favor making more money. Nevermind what it would inevitably cost the company when their monolithic conspiracy is uncovered.

You mean like what actually happened with tobacco companies knowing their product was addictive and dangerous, and concealing it? Or Enron/mortgage derivatives/any large-scale white-collar corporate crime that people thought only hurt faceless consumers and that they could get away with? I still think this basically happens already, the only thing cyberpunk adds is scale; since the world only has like three corporations, the effects of their corruption reaches more people.

As far as risk/reward goes, I guess the tobacco companies had decades of profits before that stuff came to light. The mortgage bubble fraudulent securities probably had at least 5 years. Let’s say the Black Shakes is poor at only a few years. But by far the worst is the evil moisturizer corporation from Catwoman with the poisonous beauty cream: record profits Q1, then filefor bankruptcy Q2 when everyone’s face has melted.

Okay, here’s the set-up: in 1999, I went to William Gibson’s book reading for All Tomorrow’s Parties in San Francisco. In those days, Viz was located across the street from the second-to-last onramp to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge; i.e., The Bridge. The bike messenger company Chevette works for in Virtual Light seemed, based on the description, to be less than a block away from Viz’s office–WIRED magazine, by the way, was in the same general neighborhood as well. Gibson, in fact, made gentle complaint (his personal manner is very polite) that the publisher put not the Bay Bridge, but the presumably more photogenic Golden Gate Bridge on the cover of All Tomorrow’s Parties instead.

There is probably a Situationist word to describe how the event was planned, but Gibson’s reading was wonderfully placed not in a bookstore, nor in any kind of “cyberpunk” venue, but in an elementary school classroom in the Haight–as in Haight-Ashbury, of 1960s hippie fame. Furthermore, while you might be picturing this classroom as one of Tibetan prayer flags and free-to-be-you-and-me, it was almost satirically trad–I’m talking blackboards, the alphabet in upper-and-lower case cursive running around the room, and yes, the famous unfinished portrait of George Washington–they had one of those, too. William Gibson sat on the teacher’s desk (I don’t recall if there was an apple) and the audience, naturally enough, all sat in the students’ seats–those kid-sized desks with only enough room for one sheet of paper.

There were questions afterword, and naturally, one was what was up with the JOHNNY MNEMONIC film. Gibson smiled and said that he and Robert Longo hadn’t intended to make a big release out of it, but something more fun and low-budget–what used to be called a B-movie (I believe that’s the term he used). What happened, Gibson said, was that during the film’s planning, SPEED made Keanu Reeves into a big star, so suddenly Sony decided that JOHNNY MNEMONIC had to be a big film as well, and it got blown up beyond its design capacities, as it were.

Speculating on a NEUROMANCER film, Gibson said (prudently, as it turned out) that he wasn’t sure if it would happen, but to speculation on a possible director related this anecdote: he said that Michel Gondry, director of the video for Bjork’s “Human Behaviour” (and later, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) told Gibson that the Bjork video was his way of letting him know he wanted to direct NEUROMANCER. Gibson said he could dig it.